NCC Superstations All Out for ARRL DX CW

PublishedFebruary 26, 2018

The North Coast Contesters club boasts three of the best superstations in the country – K3LR, W2FU and K8AZ – and all of them were out in force for the CW weekend of the 2018 ARRL International DX Contest . Unfortunately, conditions were terrible and this really impacted our stations this year, but our guys still put in incredible performances.

First, in the multi-multi category, perennial CW weekend winner K3LR came up a few QSOs short this year and East Coast rival W3LPL appears to have slipped past Tim’s guys by the narrowest of margins to win the USA. Interestingly, the two stations ended up with an identical multiplier total of 533, but they managed to get there in quite different ways. The K3LR ops actually had more mults than W3LPL on four bands: 160, 40, 20 and 10 meters, only failing to reach the ‘LPL mult totals on 80 and 15. But the gap on 15 was big: LPL found 10 more mults than Tim’s guys there. Here’s what Frank wrote about conditions this year:

In many respects each of us operated in a different contest. The several hundred miles between us — especially the north-south distance — has surprisingly strong propagation affects especially as we approach the bottom of the sunspot cycle making it impossible for us to compete on a level playing field. At W3LPL we benefited from longer openings to Europe on every band except 10 meters. That produced 340 more QSOs to Europe and ten common European multipliers on 15 meters that were unavailable to K3LR. K3LR enjoyed better propagation to Japan especially on 20 meters, but their 120 additional contacts to Japan couldn’t make up for our longer openings to Europe.

Nice comments from Frank, W3LPL, one of the nicest gentlemen in radio contesting today! Congratulations to both K3LR and W3LPL for fine performances.

A few miles up the road to the northeast from K3LR is the W2FU superstation. This year Jeff’s ops entered the multi-single category and seem to have walked away with the top score in the USA and Canada with 3,497 contacts, 455 mults and a claimed score of 4,747,470. Interestingly, Jeff’s crew managed to find 123 mults on 20Meters, only four less than K3LR and two less than W3LPL!

Moving in the other direction, Tom Lee’s ops at K8AZ in Cleveland’s eastern suburbs put in a fantastic performance in the M2 category, but just couldn’t keep up with the K1LZ ops 600 miles to the east in Medway, MA. Sporting all new Icom radios and optimized antennas, the ‘AZ ops kept the station on for 48 hours and ended up just short of 3,800 contacts and 466 mults for 5.3 million points. Tom’s guys actually found more mults on 10 meters, but the guys at Krassy’s slick station were almost 1,000 QSOs ahead of Tom’s crew to post a score of 7.2 million points. The same factors mentioned above by W3LPL certainly were at play in the K1LZ-K8AZ contest.

Dan, W8CAR, NCC whipper in chief, put together a summary of NCC’s scores in the 2018 ARRL DX CW weekend. Here is his report:

Total points so far 21,350,699!!!! Great job guys. If I missed your score please hit up 3830 and email me!